Music
Album Review: No Joy – More Faithful
I can’t remember the first time I heard No Joy. I know it was sometime in 2013 when they had just put out their excellent Wait To Pleasure. Something about that album was immediate and in-the-moment so I was compelled to have it. The guitar and vocal interplay between Jasamine White-Gluz and Laura Lloyd has a very …
Meet: Jah Wobble interview
How can you encapsulate the essence of the Jah Wobble experience for beginners and long-standing fans alike? The release of `Redux’ – a sumptuous six CD Boxset anthology, complete with mini-book of sleeve-notes – would be a pretty good start. Containing the old, new and reworked, it’s not the complete works of, but something of …
Track: Bacchus releases new track Hope, from EP The Rich And The War
Quiet is the new loud. You only have to look at the careers of artists such as Lucy Rose and Passenger to see that as a nation we have become lovers of the more sensitive and delicate acoustic tracks. Well here’s a new name that you may not have heard yet. If you want to …
New Music: Dutch indie rockers Stillwave release new single, From Here
Utrecht’s finest export, Stillwave, today release their third in a series of singles leading up to the recording of their much anticipated debut LP. ‘From Here’ opens up clean, fresh and alluring, as it drags you along in an almost dreamlike incantation. If you listen closely, you’ll find elements similar to ‘Karma Police’, but the …
Track: Alvvays – Adult Diversion, plus tour dates
Taken from their acclaimed self-titled debut album, comes a new single, Adult Diversion, from Canada indie kids Alvvays. It drops, via Transgressive on June 22nd, ahead of a UK tour, the last we will see of the band across here until they’ve gone away and recorded new material. It drops straight into your lap with …
Track: Albert Hammond Jr – Losing Touch, plus US tour dates
Ahead of his forthcoming solo album Momentary Masters, sometime Stroke Albert Hammond Jr is back with a new song taken from that very record, Losing Touch. Its his third solo album, but first since 2008’s ¿Cómo Te Llama?, and it drops on 31st July via Vagrant/BMG. You’ll recognise that guitar sound at the beginning, less …
Album Review: Everything Everything – Get To Heaven
Everything Everything’s third album Get to Heaven thankfully does not veer far from their first two witty, dark records. This time around they feel very confident about their work and rightly so. In fact, it contains probably their hookiest pop song yet, the first single “Distant Past” and other flashes of danceable despair. Bass player Jeremy …
Psych Insight: News – Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia 2015 line up
It is around about this time of year that my thoughts begin to turn to the Liverpool PsychFest, being held in the hugely atmospheric Baltic Triangle a stone’s throw away from the old Liverpool Docklands on 25th and 26th September. Now in its fourth year, the event is very much part of the ‘psych’ scene and, …
New Music: Dreampop quartet I Know Leopard release new single Close My Eyes
I wrote about I Know Leopard, after the release of their debut single, ‘Picture Perfect’ late last year and saw it as a perfect antidote to the Northern Hemisphere’s winter. Now, six months or so later, at my desk at the Backseat Mafia’s antipodean offices in Sydney, it is the Southern Hemisphere’s turn to be …
Track: Clean Cut Kid – Vitamin C
Liverpool four piece Clean Cut Kid, aka Mike Halls, Evelyn Halls, Saul Godman and Ross Higginson, make music best described, at least to Halls, as “Soulful pop ballads, washed in Mersey water”. After spending so much time in the studio that Saul ended up living in it (Mike and Evelyn being on the same road) …